Rebane's Ruminations

Dark Days Diary – 8jan22 (updated 12jan22)

George Rebane

The shameful declines of Scientific American and NPR.  In days of yore, both media outlets were posterchildren of professional and responsible journalism.  And during the last twenty years both have embarked on a shameful decline that shows no signs of stopping.  SA, published continuously since the 1840s, served as the periodic and apolitical compendium of scientific advances served up for the intelligent reader.  No longer.  Today it has subverted to a progressive propaganda organ that sees all aspects of science as being race-based, and promotes a fundamental change to scientific enquiry founded on Marxist class/racist principles (here).  We have already covered the decline of what is now National Propaganda Radio which serves as the publicly funded ($100M annually) voice of the Democratic Party, tilting daily more to its radically woke wing (here).  What pisses me to the gills is the amount of its taxpayer funding that the Republicans have been silent about for years.

Comparative corruption in global governance.  In an ongoing discussion with a friend and correspondent who is a retired international banker, we have focused on the existence of corruption in almost all governments, and which countries do better than others to actively control corruption.  My friend spent many years stationed in various countries and experienced first hand their inner workings which were very much in evidence through their baking and financial institutions.  Costa Rica is the standout anti-corruption posterchild in the otherwise terminally corrupt gaggle of Latin American nations.  Many thousands of American expatriates have retired to Costa Rica, and now call it their home while maintaining their US citizenship.  The chart below (compiled by the World Bank in its Worldwide Governance Indicators) provides a basis for that emigration over the years.  I am surprised to see that the US rated so high, given its recent decline from the rule of law (and constitutionalism), and the growth of an obviously corrupt ‘deep state’ bureaucracy.

[9jan22 update]  ‘More Good News on Ivermectin’ and more evidence that the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic cost millions of preventable deaths.  So have the physicians and researchers of “the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) been calling for widespread adoption of Ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.”  History will record that what has happened in the last two years across the globe has been one of greatest politically motivated mass murders on record.  And those complicit can never admit to their perfidy in promoting the proscription of this effective, readily available, and demonstrably safe medicine, for the adjudication of their criminality would require the empaneling of a Nürnberg-like court, and this will never happen.  Nevertheless, the record of this unrequited tragedy should always remain available.  Dark days indeed.

[10jan22 update]  Our housecleaner closed down after 30 years in the business.  She and her excellent crew have been part of our extended family for half of those years.  In her letter to us she cited the reasons for quitting as the usual litany of California’s war against entrepreneurship and capitalism – taxes, stifling regulations from all levels, varying Covid mandates, government checks for not working, and so on.  And sadly, she was not able to give us a reference to another local housecleaning business.  The reason?  In Nevada County she was the last holdout against the state’s anti-business winds, all of the other reputable housecleaners preceded her in pulling the plug.  More signs of the times.

North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson on reparations.  This two minute video (here) of his last year’s speech to the state’s GOP is guaranteed to moisten your eyes and send chills down your spine, unless you are a Democrat doing plantation maintenance in the country’s urban areas.

[12jan22 update]  Government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.  More information continues to be made public about the large-scale perfidy promoted by various agencies of the federal government and gratuitously integrated into the radical progressive policies in practice and promoted by the Democratic Party through its control of the administration and Congress.  Project Veritas has obtained documents that shed more light on what our government has done in promoting overseas gain-of-function research and suppression of the demonstrated benefits of Hydrochloroquine and Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid in all its phases.  This lends further credence to the allegations that senior government officials like Dr Fauci have purposively misled the American public and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions across the world.  H/T to reader.  (More here and here)

 

Predicting 2022 (updated 1jan22)

George Rebane

2022 will be another pivotal year in a growing string of such recent years.  Most predictions, save the premature happy dancing by Republicans, range between dour and cataclysmic.  A reader gives us a taste of that by pointing to James Howard Kunstler’s entry in Clusterfuck Nation with his ‘Forecast 2022 – Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age’.  So here are some of my prognostications with an invite for readers to add their own.  Please try to submit your entries before the first week of 2022 becomes history.

Since we know predicting is hard, especially about the future, and very little is certain, I will attach some quantitative probabilities to my efforts, and invite others to do the same.  We can then even determine who wins the 2022 Nostradamus Award, as I demonstrate in the coda.

1. Bumblebrain will not be president on 1 January 2023 (0.5); will not be president on 21 January 2025 (0.4); will serve out his full term (0.1).
2. Kamala will resign before 2022 election (0.6).
3. Covid will revert from pandemic to declared endemic (like the flu) status before 4 July 2022 (0.7).
4. Republicans will win the House in 2022 (0.8).
5. Republicans will win the Senate in 2022 (0.7).
6. Russia will invade Ukraine in 2022 (0.55).
7. China will invade Taiwan in 2022 (0.25).
8. Fed declared inflation will exceed 10% in 2022 (0.25).
9. Republicans will win at least 14 House seats from California (0.8).
10. The 25^th Amendment will be used to designate a new Vice President before the 2024 election (0.75).

More later, maybe.

Such a list of probability tagged predictions may be scored simply by taking the average of the ‘correct’ probabilities – i.e. probabilities that associate with the cases that come to pass.  For instance, in my list, if everything comes to pass with with Biden serving out a full term, Kamala does not resign, and China does not invade Taiwan, then my Nostradamus score – which ranges between 0 and 1 - would be (0.1+0.4+0.7+0.8+0.7+0.55+0.75+0.25+0.8+0.75)/10 = 0.58.

Jo Ann and I wish all of our readers and correspondents a productive and healthy new year.

[1jan22 update]  I just want to emphasize the reason for my #6 and #7 predictions.  Everyone in the world save America’s Democrat-prone electorate knows that the Team Biden is the weakest, most feckless, incompetent, and ignorant leadership the US has installed in the last 50 years (yes, even beating out the peanut farmer).  For either of Putin or Xi to invade would be a win for them ou two counts.  First, whatever our response, Americans tend to support their president during times of crisis.  That will assure a continuance in power of the weak and feckless Democrats.  Second, they get to achieve the next notch in their geo-strategic goals with the new territory they will then control.  What’s not to like in creating another crisis that Bumblebrain can’t handle?

‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’

George Rebane

RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here).  The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles.  Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M.  Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.

As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs.  They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible.  The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.

But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI).  One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check.  This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans.  These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.

RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment.  A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Scattershots – 10nov21

George Rebane

A lot has been happening in the Rebane clan lately.  This has kept me from posting at my usual rate.  Not only that, but every time I look at the news, I get into a dour mood and get to feeling hopeless again.  One of my current books underway is VDH’s The Dying Citizen (2021) in which he gives an historical overview of citizenry over the ages that shines a light on how our current middle classes have adopted the mantle of serfdom without the slightest inkling of it.  Not only that, but a national dialogue about our society’s state and direction is proscribed today by the Left’s minions in public education, academe, and the media.  The writings of right-leaning pundits like Fred Siegel, Robert Nisbet, Joel Kotkin, and Charles Murray are off limits, and citing their studies, no matter how well documented, is now forbidden in polite leftwing company (as I also recently discovered here).

In the past when I have found myself in such doldrums, the surefire road back has always involved ‘pushing squigglies’ on some new idea or invention.  So I dived into some financial engineering stuff on trading probabilistics of the kind pioneered by Didier Sornette – Why Stock Markets Crash (2003) – and John Casti.  (If you want to see a super-exponential, look at the recent behavior of the Dow, SP500, and Nasdaq.)  Hopefully, this work will lead into some proprietary IP.  But rummaging around with some ideas I discovered a new and handy use of the ‘WoRM formula’ beloved of artillerymen everywhere. (more here and here) It makes possible the extraction of distances and object sizes from photographs, and also allows graphic artists to correctly represent desired distances and sizes in the works they create.  I’ll write up the method so that interested readers can download a pdf of it.

Macdonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinsky stated something pretty obvious to the country’s remaining thinkers about parents having failed their children who were killed in gang warfare and police shootings.  Telling the wrong truth and calling attention to parents of the wrong race can get a well-paid executive fired.  So Kempczinsky did what anybody who puts purse before principle would do, he groveled.  My takeaway is that the poor bastard had not made his ‘go-to-hell’ stash yet, and really needed the job.  (more here and here)

COP26, the ongoing climate conference in Glasgow, has been the kabuki dance that I and most other sober observers predicted.  With leaders of major polluters absent, the rest are left to talk about utter crap like “multi-stakeholder decarbonization initiatives.”  Only people like Team Biden and its halo of flacks pretend to take any of this seriously.  Even Saint Greta of Thunberg dunned the affair as nothing but a “two-week long celebration of business as usual.”

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

WHO: Economic Development Trumps Climate Change

George Rebane

In his regular WSJ column on climate change issues, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford's Hoover Institution shines a light on the little reported aspects of the World Health Organization’s analysis of factors affecting the health of the world’s poor in the coming decades. (here) The bottom line, hidden by the Left and its lamestream media, is that more lives will be saved (by millions) through continuing the current course of global economic development, than will be saved by adopting the stringent climate change policies as prescribed by the Paris climate agreement and at next month’s Glasgow Climate Conference.  All such policies are based on utility functions which overwhelmingly favor policies that are ‘deemed’ to reduce global warming over other factors, primarily the effects of economic development on the QoL and health of the world’s poor.

The lives saved annually in 2050 by implementing existing and anticipated global warming accords is projected at 85,000.  However, over a spread of economic growth scenarios impacted by policies seeking to reduce preventable manmade global warming, the annual deaths range from 300,000 to 2,000,000 from malnutrition among the world’s poor.  If saving lives, especially among the poor, ever becomes important in these politicized and dubiously scientific considerations, then sanity advises avoiding draconian approaches such as contemplated in the Green New Deal and the additional socialist diktats on our lives and livelihoods planned by the Biden administration and amplified by established radicals such as are ensconced in Sacramento and Albany.  Per today’s dominant media and government narratives, these conclusions remain invisible to the general public.

The Canadian COVID Conspiracy: Dr David E Martin (updated 19sep21)

George Rebane

A longtime reader and friend sent me this mind-bending video on Bitchute of an interview with David Martin (here) who lays out the multi-decadal conspiracy of developing the human infectable/transmissible corona virus and the worldwide pandemic to create a market for its ‘vaccine’, which is really not a vaccine in any medical sense of the word.  I found the 54-minute video riveting as Martin unfolds and exposes the business, marketing, investment, collusion factors that come together as a description of the most massive and well-executed conspiracy to fleece the world with the enthusiastic cooperation of governments and the media.  The financial and political gifts to the co-operating players appear to be unending.

As to the verity of what Martin reports I cannot attest, since at this writing I’m not very familiar with other corroborating sources of this information.  I do invite readers to share such sources should they discover them.  In any event, for those interested in the ongoing COVID saga, the video is definitely worth watching with a glass of your favorite adult beverage, and possibly a pen and paper.  (and here is more)

For more research on David Martin and what he reports, search ‘David E Martin credibility’ on Bing to get some links that cover the pro/con sides of the matter – Google search gives a definitely one-sided collection of hits on that query.

[19sep21 update]  Here is a noteworthy development on C19 vaccines – ‘FDA Allows Whistleblower Testimony that COVID-19 Vaccines Are Killing and Harming People!’  This report has some astounding stats on the aftereffects of certain 'vaccines' that studies are now revealing.  We now know that what people are being inoculated with are not real vaccines in the medical sense, but designed, special-purpose bio-molecules ("medical devices") that are supposed to prompt your immune system to then manufacture the antibodies (provided by normal vaccines) to resist C19.  (H/T to reader)

 

Ruminations – 14sep21 (update 18sep21)

George Rebane

Government bureaucrats allocate capital better than private investors – fundamental tenet of the Left

Newsom's recall is opposed by another progressive dimwit in the 14sep21 Union (here) arguing that all of CA’s problems were there before he was elected.  The ‘gentleman’ does not understand that the recall is about his making all of the problems worse, and then adding on new ones.  And he also quotes a fictitious $70B “surplus”, having no idea that any such monies are long spoken for with the state’s over $1T in unfunded liabilities.

Europe’s electricity prices are going through the roof (here).  Why?  Well, the goddam wind is not blowing very much these days, and their having shut down their nuclear and fossil fuel plants without much consideration that the so-called sustainable sun/wind/water energy sources are sometime things, now they find their mammaries twixt the rollers.  Brings to mind the old Estonian saying about not crapping in the old well before the new one’s dug.  Here in CA, we haven’t learned a thing about that problem.

NIH investigates removal Covid genetic data per Chinese researcher request (here).  The agency removed C19 gene sequence data obtained from Wuhan patients in January/February 2020.  This data would be an important input to determining the source and type (manmade vs nature) of the virus.  The  portents of its compliant and rapid deletion from our database opens up more serious questions about the NIH/Wuhan lab relationship.  Chalk up another one for China.  Dr Fauci call your office.

[15sep21 update]  Newsom’s recall rejected by a landslide.  CA voters once again demonstrate that they know not how to select their political leaders as the state continues its downward plunge along every imaginable way – illegal alien and welfare recipient surge, rampaging homelessness, dilapidated infrastructure, exodus of productive workers, businesses, and retirees, overall population loss, increasing already high taxes, regulatory tsunami, continued growth of eco-fanatics, historic water mismanagement, historic power generation/distribution mismanagement, continued mismanagement of forests, fiscal corruption and incompetency, continued growth of record unfunded liabilities, … .  And perpetuating a never-ending, one party monopoly that only serves the takers and punishes the makers.

Gen Mark Milley’s phone calls to China promising to warn them of any pending US military action against them was one of several acts of treason our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pulled off during the Trump administration.  He is part of the devastation in our flag officer ranks that Obama left behind in his politicization of the military.  Bob Woodward and Robert Costa outline this travesty in their Peril (2021).

SecState Blinken, who is particularly unsuited for his job, now claims to bring the Taliban to heel with his toothless diplomacy.  Echoing Stalin’s famous ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’, after our precipitous and shameful retreat, the Taliban now ask, ‘How many divisions does Blinken have?’  Biden and Blinken have given new meaning to our shooting diplomatic blanks – Blinken Blanks?

C19 response mismanagement last year is laid bare in Uncontrolled Spread (2021) by former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb.  The good doctor documents the numerous and impactive screw-ups perpetrated by the CDC, FDA, and NIH which cry out for deep and penetrating investigations to better prepare us for the next pandemic.  Gottlieb highlights Warp Speed as the only government initiative undertaken correctly and against massive political opposition.

Facebook confirmed a sleazebag outfit, as demonstrated again by its corrupt censorship policy which selectively favors the high and mighty.

C19 ‘cases’ and hospitalization stats are grossly misleading and meant to support more government command and control mandates.  Both cases and hospitalizations have been overwhelmingly (positively tested) asymptomatic and mild when admitted.  Continuing to serve as the DNC trumpet, the lamestream has, of course, omitted mentioning any of this.

[17sep21 update] California voters got what they deserve, 'good and hard' (a la HL Mencken). Syndicated columnist Michael Barone lays out the particulars for us here.  And more and more of today’s college graduates reflect the socialist crap they were taught in universities by voting Democratic.

Democrats’ planned price controls on drugs will kill America’s innovative pharma industry and will be dangerous to your health. (more here and here)  The party of evil is hard at work taking the country down as fast as it can to a uniform level of misery (aka equity) that has been presaged by so many other nations adopting elitist autocratic regimes that have successfully sold central planning and control to their terminally benighted citizens.

[18sep21 update]  My essay 'America the Unnatural', originally posted here on 27 June 2021, finally appeared in today's print and online editions of The Union.  Unfortunately the print version was edited enough to change/omit several critical points in the submitted version.  However, they did kindly post the full submitted version in their online edition (here), for which I am grateful.

Afghanistan – Tell us the truth instead (updated 4sep21)

George Rebane

’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways.  These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes.  But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality.  Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run?  Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.

But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control.  You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis.  This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations.  America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’  I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again.  But it all starts with telling us the truth.

[4sep21 update]  Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste.  In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity.  So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry.  No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan.  At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.

So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban.  Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits.  And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … .  Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits.  (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)

The Ongoing and Tragic Biden Debacle

George Rebane

Let’s face it from the gitgo, Bumblebrain is so out of it that he and those supporters around him don’t even acknowledge the long list of tragedies that this administration has launched in its first eight months in office – border crisis, national crime wave, confused Covid response, $3.5T Green New Deal, mangled national employment, …, and now Afghanistan.  To them these atrocities either don’t exist or are just normative and expected reactions to their carefully laid out policies.

In Afghanistan we now see what has happened when they executed an exit policy that would have been rejected by a third-year ROTC cadet with a couple courses of military history and tactics under his belt.  The two most obvious and advised-against mistakes were the abandonment of the Bagram air base, and the withdrawing our last combat troops before starting the evacuation of civilians.  Everyone with a 3-digit IQ knew that the Afghan army would collapse as a fighting force immediately after we withdrew our air support, intelligence feeds, and contracted mechanics who kept their aircraft and their more complex combat systems operational.  And all, save the administration, knew that the Taliban would then be in Kabul in a fortnight.

Were there any honor left in the administration and its Pentagon political lackies, there would be a long list of resignations on the president’s desk to herald the much-needed housecleaning to make room for a more competent cadre of staff and military leaders.  And were any semblance of justice and concern for national security left in the Democratic Party, there would be a long list of impeachment filings against officials who were obviously derelict in their sworn duties or even criminal in their errors and omissions.

Since none of that is happening, and flacks like Psaki and Kirby are trotted out to obfuscate and confound what is really happening, we know that the cover-up of the century has been launched in preparation for next year’s midterm election.

Part and parcel of the Democrats’ national redoubt is California’s September recall election.  I am of the school that believes that Team Newsom with the help of national Democrats will do whatever is necessary to make sure Gavin does not get recalled.  The state’s election laws are now tailored to support election fraud and ‘irregularities’, abetted by everything from universal use of mail-ballots to the voting/vote counting period that extends before and after the 14sep21 election day.

California has been mismanaged so visibly and for so long that, post-Newsom, people will immediately ascribe responsibility to the state’s political monopoly.  A Republican governor will have the ability to reverse an untold number of misbegotten policies, codes, initiatives, and regulations that have been put in place by executive fiat.  The immediate impact of such a reversal will be apparent to a sufficient fraction of the state’s voters that it would most likely signal the end of the Democrats’ super-majority legislature, and perhaps even their massive embeds in the state’s various appointed and elected office slots.  The problem for the national Democrats is that such a political epiphany will be seen everywhere, and give lie to the progressive policies that have issued from state capitals and city halls across the land, those dominated by proto-Marxist politicians.

The amount of out-of-state money pouring in to support Newsom’s retainment attests to this assessment.  And we ain’t seen nothing yet when the fireworks erupt as the election draws nigh.  It will be a hot time in the old town for many a night.

Meanwhile, Biden’s tragic Afghanistan rout rolls on. (more here)

‘Illiberal American Century’

George Rebane

[This is a quick response to an essay by a noted leftwing academic that I received from a longtime correspondent and friend who sometimes tacks a bit to my port side.  I post it because the author presents a good summary of what continues to abet our Left’s ongoing expressions of TDS as their never-ending source of all ills that currently blanket this fair land.]

America is becoming a “rogue superpower” according to Michael Beckley, leftwing academic at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and a professor at Tufts.  His essay ‘Rogue Superpower – Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century’ in the Nov/Dec2020 Foreign Affairs argued that President Trump’s policies focusing on America’s interests was making our country a pariah hegemon in the community of nations.  Events since then have made many important aspects of his arguments moot or just plain wrong, but his arguments are worth reviewing since they still form the core of what Democrats and their radical left purvey daily through our lamestream media.

To begin, Beckley has a somewhat skewed if not jaundiced view of history with blithe observations that after WW2 “hundreds of millions accepted communism”, a proposition that flies in the face of the actual methods communists used to subvert national governments and turn nations into wholesale gulags under the heels of tyrants who slaughtered millions of their own citizens.

Beckley sees Trump’s policy of having NATO countries pay at their agreed levels (2% of GDP) for their and the continent’s security as a mortal sin of international diplomacy.  Beckley’s solution is for us to continue bearing the overwhelming share of NATO’s defense budget, and subsume our national interest in the process.  He does not recognize nor make mention of China’s rapid advances in technology (mostly purloined), military build-up, and territorial expansions.  This blind spot makes him a critic of America’s response to Trump’s defense budgets.

Somehow the entire decades-long successful strategy of containing communist, and now fundamentalist Islamic tyrannies, is completely overlooked.  It’s as if Beckley is ignorant of what George Kennan laid out in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ to President Truman.  There Kennan made clear the global aims of the Left headed by the USSR and supported by numerous Marxist-Leninist regimes that supplanted many formerly western colonial governments after WW2.

Kennan’s counsel was assiduously followed during the Cold War, and specifically supported by Trump in his announced policy of fielding expeditionary units as needed vs maintaining expensive and politically sensitive permanent bases as the correct solution to an affordable and effective white hat global hegemony.  Beckley missed this one completely and recommends global deterrence by setting up US missile bases on foreign soils.  He is apparently ignorant of how allies like Germany responded when we suggested basing intermediate range nuclear missiles in their lands.  At least then we had our troops in those countries to defend such installations.  Beckley is silent on the force levels required to defend the foreign-based missiles in his plan.  And curiously, he argues against Trump’s stated policy of using Taiwan and the Baltics as well-armed buffers against China’s and Russia’s demonstrated expansionist aims.

And some things Beckley just gets wrong for reasons that are out of scope for this short piece.  An example is his assertion that Trump “gutted” DepState and “handed more responsibility to the Pentagon”.  Save for increasing defense spending, Trump did exactly the opposite with his announced policies of diminishing our military’s overseas roles and bases, and in Mike Pompeo, installing one of the most knowledgeable and widely respected SecStates in recent history.  I invite comparison to Biden’s low grade ore Antony Blinken now underperforming in that slot.  (In addition to him I invite your attention to our newly politicized Pentagon with worthies like SecDef Austin and JCS Chair Gen Milley.  What they are doing to our military deserves expanded inquiries by the DOJ and a bipartisan congressional committee.  Cutting to the chase, Biden has populated his cabinet with an historical legion of losers.)

So, along with many other Americans, I am puzzled as to what is rogue about a country acting in its own best interests to maintain world order - e.g. see Kissinger’s World Order (2014)  ALL other countries have demonstrably done the same for centuries, and do so to this day.  Beckley wants the US to continue its sacrifice-and-pay policy while suborning America’s interests to that of its allies and even countries that are openly hostile to us – has he forgotten Golden Rule #2? - ‘them that’s got the gold makes the rules’, or its gentler version, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’  America First has never meant that the rest of the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

Scattershots – 19aug21 (updated 23aug21)

George Rebane

“Since the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, China has what economists call a socialist market economy – one in which a dominant state-owned enterprises sector exists in parallel with market capitalism and private ownership.”  This is the version of capitalism of which many on our Left are so enamored, with claims of how such restructuring of the economy will promote - wait for it - equity.  The truth is actually the opposite.  The further the socialist slide toward communism has progressed, the more unequal becomes a country’s economy and wealth distribution as measured by the UN in its Gini Index (or Coefficient) ratings of member countries.  The index ranges between zero (complete equality) and one (complete inequality) – a review here.  Today China’s GI = 70.4 compared to America’s GI = 47.7 (more here)  That’s quite a difference in wealth distribution, and completely expected for authoritarian cum totalitarian regimes.  Team Biden and the new radically socialist wing of the Democratic Party are busy fundamentally transforming our economy to more resemble the People’s Republic of China.

[20aug21 update]  Islam – our eternal foe?  So suggests Robert Nicholson, president of the Philos Project, as he dances around the notion of religious plurality in the Middle East.  In his ‘The Unconquerable Islamic World’ (20aug21 WSJ) he writes – “The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the ‘Jews and Crusaders’ who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.” (emphasis mine)  Combine such ‘normative beliefs’ with Islam’s taqiya, and you get a much better idea of the Muslim mentality that the world faces.  [23aug21 update is the nearby picture.  H/T to correspondent.]

[21aug21 update]  ‘The biggest crime committed during the vaccine heist is the censorship of Ivermectin’  (H/T to reader)  In these pages over the past 18 months we have covered the imbecility and criminality of our governments’ Covid responses, blindly abetted by millions of our leftwing lackies.  Most recently RR focused on the criminality of withholding effective and established prophylactic and treatment drugs from the American public while hundreds of thousands needlessly died waiting for Warp Speed to bear fruit (here).  Now more physicians and scientists have begun to speak out about this enormous crime.  The above cited pieces summarizes –

• While the list of crimes committed by authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic is a long one, perhaps the biggest crime of all is the purposeful suppression of safe and effective treatments, including ivermectin. This appears to have been done to protect the COVID “vaccine” program
• The COVID shots were brought to market under emergency use authorization (EUA), which can only be obtained if there are no other safe and effective alternatives available
• Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies looked at ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection. A rapid review performed on behalf of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the U.S., January 3, 2021, found the drug “probably reduces deaths by an average 83% compared to no ivermectin treatment”
• According to a more recent review and meta-analysis, ivermectin, when used preventatively, reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86%
• Another recent scientific review concluded ivermectin produces large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance

Do you have your prescribed Ivermectin courses of treatment ready to go in your medicine cabinet?

Speaking of getting vaccinated, one should take every opportunity -

[more 23aug21 update]  And now, if you can lower your eyes a mite, for your edification we delve into a bit of timely poetry.

Afghanistan Reflections (updated 21aug21)

George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

Climate Hysteria 3.0 (maybe 4.0)

George Rebane

‘Settled’ is not an adjective to be used with real science.

The recently released AR6 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has injected new life into climate hysteria that seems to have been flagging over the last few years.  The usual hysterics are again up in arms with another round of outlandish warnings and proposals to tank the economies of the developed countries, led, of course, by the US.  More sober and knowledgeable scientists are saying ‘not so fast’.

Physicist Steven Koonin has been introduced in these pages as one of the leading sober and knowledgeable scientists who has for some years now been counseling a more measured view of climate change.  His recent best seller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), summarizes the unsubstantiated fears and foibles that continue to be foisted on the lay public worldwide.  The 11aug21 WSJ, from which the nearby figure was filched, contains his critique of AR6, and is definitely worth a read.  I’ll give some highlights.

To begin for those late to this pity party, what all the fuss is about that we are ignoring a global catastrophe in process – namely, preventable manmade global warming (PMGW).  Every word in that label is important, and it’s the ‘preventable’ part that promises to be most devastating to the fortunes of developed countries.  You have to be convinced that we humans did it all by ourselves, and that therefore we can and must roll back global warming all by ourselves.

In ‘Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole’ Dr Koonin begins with -

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.

The entire history of climate reporting has been a mire of politicized fraud.  RR readers learned years ago that all the prognostications about PMGW are based on a collection of incoherent, incomplete, and essentially broken general circulation models (e.g. we don't understand earth's CO2 cycle).  The have been twisted beyond recognition by true believers and fraudsters to yield the gee-whiz graphs and endlessly repeated, hysterical talking points.

It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface. … The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.

The other big bamboozle involves pointing to unusual weather as confirmation of climate change.  These assessments and dire pronouncements are made daily by innumerates who have no idea what science is or how it can substantiate something.

Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events. … The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.

The IPCC report reveals very little that is new.  It is mostly the repackaging of past reports by a legion of contributing authors, each working within their narrow field.  The almost 4,000 page tome has been read by very few, and understood by even fewer.  Nevertheless, AR6 will feature prominently in the upcoming November UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  So it’s important to understand both the nature of its contents and misrepresentations about PMGW that are always prominent in the executive summary and conclusion sections of what the IPCC publishes.  Here is the AR6 Headline Statements from the Summary for Policy Makers.

Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact. … Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.

Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. - Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

George Rebane

According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence - is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

[4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with -

Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.

Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

George Rebane

Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

[13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

[14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

[18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

Scattershots - 12may21 (updated 14may21)

George Rebane

Online cheating at all time high (here).  Getting someone else to do your assignment or take your test is a big business in the current epoch of remote learning.  Students cite the difficulty in learning anything in the remote and virtual presentations of material they are offered.  Others say that the stress level to achieve today is higher than ever.  Both reasons seem to justify cheating by hiring online ‘tutors’ to do their work.  Online cheating is very hard to detect, and everyone believes that what was put in practice during the C19 pandemic will be continued in the new post-pandemic ‘normal’.  Combine this with the already crap for curriculum that unionized public school teachers deliver, and the future for the next generation of ‘educated’ workers looks very dim, … and what does that do for America having to compete in international markets and maintaining leadership in defense technologies?  All this is being brought about in an environment of classroom chaos tolerated more than ever in the name of ‘racial equity’.  (more here)

Everyone is testing Biden on the world stage, and so far he continues to fail every test.  As most of us predicted last year in these pages, Bumblebrain as president would be subjected to a battery of international ‘crises’ as soon as he was sworn in.  And true to form, every bad guy on the geo-strategic stage is now taking advantage of the American president renown for his absolute ignorance of how the world order works as attested to his record of past failures in assessing international events and problems.  Bumblebrain has surrounded himself with a remarkable cadre of limp-wristed policy makers and enforcers who have garnered no respect from our allies and antagonists (e.g. note how Alejandro Mayorkas SecDHS continues to deny the border crisis and push the administration’s Big Lie that “the border is secure”).  The likelihood for a major conflict and/or setback on the world stage increases daily.

Almost all economists cannot make useful predictions of economic behavior and events.  My view of economists, especially those professing quantitative models and more so those of socialist leanings, has been justifiably dour for most of my adult life.  Today these know-nothings are especially in demand by the Dems and the Biden administration to sprinkle some progressive pixie dust on the country’s path to ever more comprehensive socialism.  But as usual, they make huge errors that would be egregious in any public forum attended by an informed and numerate population.  That being far from the case, the current cadre of economists are free to continue their nonsensical blatherings without harming any one but America’s taxpayers.  The most recent example being their prediction of a million new jobs for April that turned out to be less than one fourth that number. (more here)

Anybody know what Trump did that was unconstitutional?  The Dems and their lamestream lackeys repeat that charge daily in their desperate attempts to divert attention from their own anti-constitutional proposals and policies.  Today the list of the most egregious anti-American activities of the Dems is headed by their utter abandonment of border security and their promotion of HR1 in Congress.  The latter’s provisions are based on enormous lies and cynical assessments of our national elections and the country's state of affairs in general.  Their intent is to bring the nation’s elections under federal control, in distinct contravention of our Constitution’s prescriptions.  True to their rampant road to socialism, HR1 would destroy the federalism under which the several states conduct their elections. (more here) Central planning and control über alles.

CDC, NIH, WHO, …, all of them have shown how politicized science can mismanage responses to the Covid pandemic at all levels of government.  The potpourri of pronouncements from such agencies over the last year have been all over the map, and continue to this day.  Their main function has been to let politicians establish and extend illegal, unnecessary, and harmful public policies, the only function of which is to reduce individual liberties and expand the establishment of a powerful centralized government.  The latest such revelation (which is not news to most RR readers) is CDC’s lying about the C19’s outdoor transmission rate which enables politicians to double down on social distancing and mask mandates.  These substantive big lies have been enthusiastically backed by the Dems and trumpeted daily by their lamestream media.  Their impact on the nation’s economic health and forms of transforming governance will be studied for decades by free-thinking historians.  Government historians have already written this history and incorporated it into the nation’s school curricula.  (more here and here)

[14may21 update]  Masks still required for the vaccinated frequenting crowded spaces.  So can someone from the vaunted ‘party of science’ explain how the immunizing and prophylactic properties of the vaccine diminish when the vaccinated walk into one of these crowded space?  The CDC failed to expand on that point.  Even David Leonhardt of the NYT penned a critical commentary of the CDC (here) about its baseless, fluid, and science-free face mask mandates. (H/T to reader, and more here, here and here)

Covid, the third greatest killer in the land?  This little stat is being purveyed perhaps to justify the mostly insane response policies that have been recommended and implemented by government agencies and jurisdictions over the last year.  Our own Don Rogers (Union publisher) writes today – “Some of us also learned folly, depression, grief, though these were not nearly so widespread nor the disease so deadly as at first feared. Still, it is widespread. It is deadly. It is the third-leading cause of death in America, right behind cardiac disease and cancer whether you count by diagnosis or annual deaths above average. It is real.”  Such naked reporting overlooks C19’s role as the stand-in grim reaper for the elderly and/or infirm who were statistically on death’s door with or without the pandemic.  Some malady was going to take these people in any case, and it turned out to be a dreaded disease that had little if any measurable effect on the mortality rates of the young and younger.  C19 was able to rack up its score and place third this time only because of its (not so exceptional) virulence and some wrong-headed and random response policies.  But writing reports which make the lightly-read reader believe that now we have permanently ensconced a new third-place killer is both misleading and wrong.  All that such journalism does is perpetuate continued and docile acceptance of population control policies, no matter how ill-advised.

Scattershots – 28mar21 (updated 1apr21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

I have to get a few things down for the record.  There is so much absolute crap coming out of the Biden administration that it’s really impossible to log all of it.

‘Luxury Floating Real Estate’

George Rebane

Living on a huge manmade island may be the thing of the future for those who can afford it and want to escape from the ever more contested and politically roiling lands that cover about 29% of the Earth’s 197,000,000 sq mi surface.  The first of these islands is being built off the Bahamas by an outfit that calls itself The Blue Estate (here).  Multiples of such islands are planned to reside off Dubai in the Persian Gulf which are advertised to be miniature havens of German, Swiss, Italian, and Swedish culture.  The Blue Estate plan envisions an island measuring 1,500 by 1,000 meters as shown below.

The island’s size, modular construction, and high (130ft) free board, augmented by another 100+ foot extendable windwalls, we are told will assure the structure’s calm survival in the roughest of hurricanes.  The island will also have propulsion and guidance so that it can transit open ocean areas to avoid storms.

Yet to be explained is to what extent the island will be energy self-sufficient using solar, wind, and wave energy extraction technologies.  Its home area will be in international waters, minutes by air away from Miami and Bahamian towns.  Apparently, food and other consumables will be imported.

The community will also be economically self-sufficient by being home to clean commercial enterprises and the successfully retired.  The commercial activities will be heavily IT oriented with ample satellite connectivity.  I can envision that it might also be home to small R&D firms engaged in computer science, genomics, and similar areas.  Located in a tropical sea with abundant (300+ days/yr) sunshine, the island can also operate a sizeable nearby sea farm containing various flora supported by an underwater matrix which will give rise to a whole new ecosystem of rich sea life similar to what exist around oil drilling platforms and the Navy’s ‘kelp farm’ (off San Clemente Island) on which I worked years ago.

One of the potential attractions of such seaborne communities may be their ability to provide social stability through a discriminative selection of residents.  It is clear to me that some such island communities will emphasize cultural cohesion of their residents.  Offering such cohesive environments seems to be the goal of the planned Persian Gulf islands that will focus on providing culture-specific resort living and holidays.

As an entrepreneur and systems nerd, I am drawn to the dreaming and planning of such habitats, and in the present case could go on for pages contemplating different concepts and their supporting technical, commercial, environmental, educational, cultural, … support systems and institutions.  But to me the problem of having the seas support a considerable population of such islands in different parts of the world will come down to the solution of the inevitable political problems that will arise and need solutions that can be implemented globally.

Because these island communities will attract (and be limited to) the smart, productive, and ‘financially capable’ people, they will naturally become hotbeds of wealth generation.  And they will therefore become tax and tariff prey for the land-based political grifters who maintain their collectivist regimes by bamboozling their poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.  These people need state supplied succor that their political leaders will not allow them to generate for all the reasons we have discussed in these pages.

In such political landscapes those who can will escape to available locales with lower taxes, regulations, and abundant liberties.  This we see happening in today’s American migrations, and have witnessed for decades (centuries?) in Europe and Asia where the productive congregate in enclaves such as Singapore, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong.  Therefore, new political paradigms need to be discovered if the financially and culturally attractive island communities are to thrive and multiply.  Else the early ones will just be economically harvested to oblivion by the land-based stifling autocracies that see such free and enterprising enclaves as low-hanging fruit.

Much more to be said about all this.

India Cracks COVID Code (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

For many weeks now we’ve been hearing a lot about the astounding C19 stats coming out of India.  Their rate of confirmed C19 cases is shown in the figure below as compiled by Johns Hopkins University.  And how have they achieved such astounding results?

The answer lies in the country’s taking a radically different tack for both C19 prevention and therapeutics that emphasizes the use of off-shelf anti-viral and anti-parasitic drugs which have been dunned by our healthcare industry, both private and governmental.  The more complete story is told in ‘India Develops Effective COVID Treatment for Under $3 Per Person While America Remains in Vaccine Frenzy’.  (H/T to reader) The bottom line is that India’s government distributes anti-C19 packets – labelled Ziverdo – based on Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine (early on touted by President Trump) that cost about $2.65 each.  I have posted on both Ivermectin and HCQ which have yet to receive AMA or FDA approval while big pharma’s expensive vaccines have enjoyed an historical fast track into people’s arms.

Ziverdo kits are available from multiple sources (here) for those wishing to lay in an extra layer of protection against C19.  Ziverdo is reported effective both as a prophylactic and a therapeutic as demonstrated by the available hospitalization and mortality stats.

One reason why the lamestream does not publicize this news is that early on President Trump was in favor of existing bio-chemical medicines to fight C19, an approach that did not comport with the Left’s making the pandemic as bad as possible during the 2020 election year.  Why outlets like FN have not picked up on this is a puzzle to me.  Yet one more item to add to the evidence for the ongoing global fraud. (more here)  Perhaps readers have better insights.

[30jan21 update]  Apparently Congress and the federal government has been fully apprised of India’s major response to C19 with it dispensing of millions of Ziverdo kits to be used as both a prophylactic and a therapeutic.  In our media we have heard nothing of this; how come?  Here is a report of recent testimony to the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, and here another study recommending use of Ivermectin.  Everyone’s lips seemed to be securely sealed.  (H/T to reader)

For more information on the Ziverdo kits and their recommended usage, here is the website of one of its purveyors.

‘2034’

George Rebane

This is a heads-up on a good read – 2034 – A Novel of the Next World War that will be published in early March.  It is written by two military and national security heavyweights – Elliot Ackerman and Adm James Stavridis, both ranking high in our national security apparatus; Ackerman in the White House and Stavridis former CIC of our Southern Command and then head of NATO military.  The first part of the novel took up the entire Jan 2021 issue of Wired.  I started reading it, and it immediately grabbed me.  I’m a kinda finicky reader, especially fiction, reserving time only for geo-political and edge sci-fi written by people who’ve 'been there and done that' – ‘2034’ definitely qualifies and promises to also be an education on a lot of systems and tactics.  Anyway, I thought that you would find this a good and timely read.  Here’s some promotional copy – “From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic, geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.”

I sent the above notice to a group of friends who may be interested in geo-political thrillers with technical element that is written by knowledgeable authors.  Since then, the book has received some very good reviews from noteworthy people.  (more here and here)

“War with China is the most dangerous scenario facing us and the world. Absent a strategic method to manage our differences, Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s chilling novel presents a realistic series of miscalculations leading to the worst consequences. A sobering, cautionary tale for our time.” — Jim Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (Ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense

“A real page-turner, 2034 is a novel about a conflict we hope never happens. Drawing on their deep operational and diplomatic backgrounds, Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman have conjured a nightmare we desperately need to avoid. The novel is a cautionary tale for our times, and a reminder how quickly events can spin out of control—even before 2034.” — Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011

Scattershots – 18dec20 (updated 22dec20)

George Rebane

The recall of Gov Gavin Newsom is making good progress, and petition signatures may be collected until 10 March 2021.  Here is the link to get your signature on a petition to recall this hubristic progressive idiot before he does more damage to our state.

Cato’s annual Human Freedom Index just published; it rates each country’s freedom along twelve dimensions.  The top ten countries in order of rank were - New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and Germany and Sweden (tied in 9th place).  The United States and United Kingdom tied in 17^th place.  And it appears that, given the Democrats’ headlong progressive plunge toward socialism, our freedoms will be more limited as Team Biden builds back leviathan and its stifling laws, regulations, and taxes. (more here)

[19dec20 update] California finally has a draconian plan to chase away the rich, and then keep stalking them.  Now going through the state Assembly is “a proposed wealth tax (that) would apply for a decade to anyone who spends 60 days in the state in a single year.” (more here)  I have prophesized this future for us for some years now.  The state has been so badly mismanaged by collectivist Democrats for decades that it now needs to go after the already-taxed assets of its residents, starting with the wealthy, and then as always, working the damage down to the middle classes.  “Assembly Bill 2088 proposes calculating the wealth tax based on current world-wide net worth each Dec. 31. For part-year and temporary residents, the tax would be proportionate based on their number of days in California. The annual tax would be on current net worth and therefore would include wealth earned, inherited or obtained through gifts or estates long before and long after leaving the state.”  The ongoing exodus of our producers will now sky rocket, to be replaced by the new battalions of Biden's border bandidos.  These are topics worthy of discussing with our progressive readers who will not touch them with a ten-footer.

Expanding on the theme that Democrats are butt stupid and evil, we should note some stats over the last couple of years as reported by the WSJ –

• 660 companies have left California,
• 765 companies’ facilities have been moved out of California,
• Over 200,000 Californians have emigrated to Texas, more to other destinations,
• Welfare recipients and illegals continue to arrive in droves to keep the population stable.

And all because we have a political monopoly of double dummies who have no idea how humans behave (‘Tax rates don’t affect economic behavior’) and how to manage a productive economy.  All they know is that to stay in political power they need ever more ignorant voters buttressed by illegal aliens on the way to citizenship and the ballot box (not necessarily in that order), and tax the bejeezus out of those who have money and can still earn.

[22dec20 update]  Corporatists are racing to implement racist policies, and pledging big bucks to assure the new woke administration and their lamestream mouthpieces that they indeed are virtuous to a tee.  But it’s hard to tell where all those millions and billions will be spent to the advertised goal of "racial equity" in lending to and locating in black communities.  And no one is sure that the promised amounts aren’t just coming back to other businesses not owned by blacks.  But the puffing and parading under banners of social justice in the media is worth twice price paid to PR outfits to promote the newly progressivist participants.  BTW, haven't we tried all this at least a couple of times before? (more here)

Scattershots – 3dec20 (updated 8dec20)

George Rebane

SCOTUS finally ruled against Gov Cuomo on the religious freedom case.  The 26nov20 NYT reported, “The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus. … The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.” (more here)  Justice Barrett was the crucial vote for the 5-4 majority, with Chief Justice Roberts (the court’s new ‘swing vote’) going limp again and voting with the liberals.  Justice Gorsuch wrote the excellent majority ruling (here) wherein he states, “It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques,”

‘This is why Yuja Wang is Wonder Woman’.  Ms Wang is unquestionably one of the greatest piano virtuosi to come along in many a year.  Take a listen to a five minute sampling of what this woman can do with a piano – truly a celebration and vindication of western culture and how it has contributed to the shaping of global cultures.

‘Big Companies Urge Biden, Congress to Address Climate Change’ - Amazon, Citigroup, Ford and others support a U.S. return to the Paris accords from which Trump withdrew.  Well, whouda thought?  (more here)  With the advent of the Biden administration we are going to see a return of corporatism on steroids.  Cash rich corporatists have always been lobbyists and supporters for all kinds of new regulations and fees that can be levied on their respective industries and business sectors.  We recall that a corporatist is a big corporation that can no longer effectively compete in free markets without some kind of government support.  Increasing costs for their smaller competitors and raising the barriers to entry for newcomers is always best achieved by established corporatists who can pay off legislators and regulators to do their assigned duties – all for the benefit of the consumer, of course.  These are the naïfs who ultimately will get it in the shorts, and pay for the whole thing.  (In case we have some new readers here, please recall that corporations pay no taxes or fees; they just pass those costs on to their customers.  But that’s a whole ‘nother story.) 

[4dec20 update]  Cutting the unemployment bonus again proved that the Left doesn’t do economics.  Writing unemployed low-wage workers checks with an added $600 bonus was supposed give the economy a boost and lower unemployment according to progressive economists like the socialist sage Paul Krugman.  Wrong again.  Workers got paid more for not working and the economy didn’t go anywhere.  When President Trump had to compromise eliminating the bonus to just lowering it to $300, then, lo and behold, unemployment plummeted and the economic growth set decades-long records.  As the song says, ‘When will they ever learn?’

Marc Andreessen, web browser pioneer and venture capitalist, years ago claimed that ‘software will eat the world’ (here).  AI has now achieved the ability to automatically generate code for some very structured applications, and soon will become smart enough to write programs from only verbal instructions, thereby promising to make legions of programmers redundant.  Some interpret this coming state of affairs with the claim that “Software Ate the World, and Soon It Will Write Itself”, going on to conclude that “developers are in short supply, but their products may acquire the capacity to replace them.”  Well no, that’s not quite true.  Most non-techies still believe that ‘line programmers’ create the wondrous systems that dazzle and deliver us.  But learning to code in a programming language, and learning to conceive and design a system to do what has never been done are two different skill sets – the first any smart high schooler can accomplish, the second takes a bit more education in one of any number of specific fields.  Bottom line, software is no more ‘eating the world’ than did movable type in days of yore – you still had to have something more to become an acknowledged wordsmith than what was needed to learn how to smith the words into print.  In the same way today, it will take more from fewer to come up with novel things the software must do, than the larger number who can learn how to make the software do it.  It’s the latter who should soon tremble.

Ever hear of ‘emotional support animals’?  Well, they’re a couple of steps beyond ‘service dogs’ in what they apparently provide to their owners.  And there’s more to be said about the portents of such critters, the humans they emotionally support, and the crumbling culture that now puts up with such nonsense.  This morning we awoke to news of a passenger bringing his peacock into the passenger compartment of an airliner.  Now those of you who know peacocks can readily conceive of the pandemonium that such an aggressive animal with non-existent toilet discipline will create attempting to come down the aisle and be confined to the middle seat.  Today’s laws do not allow anyone to question the legitimate and beneficial purpose that such arbitrarily selected support animals satisfy for those emotionally short-changed.  On that flight the pilot was astute enough not to take off with a cabin catastrophe in the making, but we were not told how the gathered authorities adjudicated the affair.  From my semanticist’s perch, it is clear that our language has not evolved at a sufficient pace to provide adequate adjectives to describe the depths of insanity that today’s progressive ideology is inflicting on our society.

[5dec20 update]  Check out the report on the anti-viral Ivermectin in 'Mismanaging Covid-19 ...'.

[6dec20 update]  Andrew Cuomo – talk about scumbag politicians lying to the public.  This political hack is one of the few in the nation to whom hundreds of Covid deaths can be directly attributed – recall his tragically misguided care facility diktat.  Now he tells the country that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed had nothing to do with the early development, testing, and approval of C19 vaccines; the big pharmas would have developed it anyway since they’re only interested in profits.  He believes his audience to be appropriately ignorant of what Warp Speed did to pave the path and lower the financial risk to the pharmas for them to put a very expensive full court press on their vaccine developments.  We know from decades of data how long it would have taken doing the same ol’ same ol’.  But that don’t make no never mind to another Democrat Big Liar telling people another Big Lie.

"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out", David Horowitz here aligning with Rebane Doctrine.

[8dec20 update]  Cringing capitalists and the great Cocoa Collusions.  The cocoa growers of Ghana and Ivory Coast (61% of world supply) decided to collude and raise the price of cocoa by almost 20%, claiming to alleviate worker poverty.  Naturally candy producers like Hershey and Mars don’t want to pay more for their prime ingredient, so they are working together trying to find ways to pay less for cocoa (what a concept!).  In this crazy world of progressive pandemics, virtue signaling has become a de rigueur for both corporatists and cringing capitalists.  Both Hershey and Mars are denying that they are trying to circumvent the ‘virtuous’ price increase, when instead they should counter with the free and open markets’ correct argument.  They should tell the cocoa growers that producers also have an obligation to keep prices low for their customers whose financial welfare is no less important than that of the cocoa workers.  Virtue signaling has become a particularly contagious and corrosive form of cringing for capitalists in the face of socialism’s global advance.  (more here)

A new approach to ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’  In the 8dec20 Union, Mr Rob Cairns attempts to heal our divide by suggesting that, instead of attacking, we sit down with our opposites to have a “real conversation” with “them”.  The conversation would launch with questions like ‘What’s important to you?’, ‘What are your concerns?’, ‘What are your fears?’, ‘What are your hopes?’, ‘What are your priorities?’.  A laudable approach indeed, but one having little chance of success when considered in light of the now drastically different belief systems that today propel our polarization.  RR has spent years revealing and dissecting our contending beliefs, and the record is here for all to see.  When a leftist finally deigns to reveal his belief(s) and/or solutions to social problems, to rightists they range from the odious to patently unworkable.  What such questions serve to divert from is an exploration of the meta-world views (i.e. ontologies) of the two discussants.  Without understanding each other’s basic views of how ‘their world’ functions, the rest of the conversation quickly becomes moot since the participants cannot help but talk past each other.  And the real problem, encountered in the attempt to explore ontologies, is that perhaps only a small share of people are capable of such productive pursuits.  Alas.

Today's joke from Rush Limbaugh illustrates the above ontological differences.  A capitalist sitting at a bar is sandwiched between Bernie Sanders and AOC while watching the news.  They see a tense video of a man ready to jump from a tall building.  The capitalist says, 'I have $10 that says he jumps.'  Begrudgingly Sanders and AOC take him up on the bet.  The man jumps to his death, and the capitalist collects his winnings.  Then a moment later he says, 'I can't take your money, because I saw this report earlier on the news.'  AOC responds with, 'That's OK, so did we, but we didn't think he'd do it again.'